1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to data processing systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing context-aware automatic e-mail filtering and reply generation.
2. Description of Related Art
Although personal computers have become less expensive and in general more powerful, they are still difficult to use. The basic icon-oriented display, desktop metaphor and mouse interface have changed little in the past two decades. Attempts to make PCs easier to use have all been focused around the current display, keyboard, and mouse. For the most part, designers have concentrated on making PCs easier to use by changing the behavior of those three standard components rather than changing the entire paradigm. In other words, developers keep trying the make old user interface work but have failed to look “outside the box” for alternative methods of user interaction.
Writing filters for e-mail and bulk e-mail messages referred to as SPAM is not a new technology. Most e-mail programs have some level of feature to filter e-mail messages by matching the user ID of the sender. While this has been somewhat successful in the past for filtering unwanted e-mail messages, bulk mail programs have become more sophisticated and generate random user IDs to foil the filtering software.
Current technology to determine the contents of an e-mail message have focused on providing the algorithms to determine the contents of the message using some form of message scanning. The scanning routine attempts to determine the contents of the message based on semantic rules. It would be desirable, however, to have an e-mail filtering program that filters out messages based on the user or sender's identification or IP address.